Public sociology and economic sociology: introductory remarks

This issue of SER contains three articles on public sociology and economic sociology, which all have their origin in a session on this theme that was held at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2006 in Montreal. The reason for organizing this session was a sense that ‘new economic sociology’ has ignored many of the issues that are associated with the term ‘public sociology’. If one looks at the writings in ‘new economic sociology’ from the mid-1980s and onwards one will, on the whole, find very few attempts to relate economic sociology to such issues as the political role of the analyst, how economic sociology can be used to change or improve the world and the like. The reasons for this apolitical character of new economic sociology is not clear. Maybe the desire to establish economic sociology as a legitimate academic field was too strong or maybe many of its early practitioners had had enough of activist politics during the 1960s. Alternatively, maybe they were responding to the ideology of neo-liberalism that was just being launched at around this time. In any case, issues that should have been addressed were not being addressed.